This fairly old Chinese man is actually looking at crickets. The boxes you can see on the picture each contain a single cricket. They are actually used for officially prohibited but very popular fights in which two crickets are placed in a small sort of circular arena. Its obviously male crickets, cause female crickets wouldnt bother to attack each other. But the male ones tend to do that immediately. The surrounding crowd can place bets on either of the competing crickets and become very rich or very poor very quickly. To find out whether the cricket is worth investing some money, the men use a little straw like stick to provoke them. if they react with aggression, its probably a good buy.